Storytelling:
“I’m sitting in a cozy little coffeehouse in Clarendon, listening for whispers of evil. It’s an important journalistic mission; I am trying to rescue an endangered literary cliche, the one about how places carry ‘echoes of their past.’ Every journalist depends on this cliche when we write our crappy stories about Civil War battlefields, or the razing of some venerable stadium, or some neighborhood that was once great and is now grim.”
—Gene Weingarten, columnist, The Washington Post, 2008. (See Column.) (Thanks to alert WORDster Nancy Williams)
On This Day . . .
. . . In 2007, journalist and author David Halberstam died in a car crash in Menlo Park, Calif.
. . . In 1969, Sirhan Sirhan was sentenced to death for assassinating Robert F. Kennedy.
. . . In 1789, President-elect George Washington and his wife Martha moved into the first Executive Mansion, Franklin House in NYC.
. . . In 1954, Hank Aaron hit his first MLB homerun, for the Milwaukee Braves.
. . . In 1992, McDonald’s opened its first Beijing restaurant.
. . . In 1995, sportcaster Howard Cosell died, age 77.
. . . In 1998, James Earl Ray, who confessed to shooting Martin Luther King Jr. and later recanted, died at 70.
Birthdays:
54 . . . Michael Moore, filmmaker
69 . . . Lee Majors, the “Six Million Dollar Man”
80 . . . Shirley Temple Black, child actress-turned-diplomat
59 . . . Joyce DeWitt, actress ("Three's Company")
47 . . . George Lopez, actor and comedian
25 . . . Daniela Hantuchova, tennis player
• William Shakespeare (1564-1616), the bard
• Max Planck (1858-1947), German Nobel Prize-winning physicist
• James Buchanan (1791-1868), 15th U.S. president (1857-61)
• Stephen Douglas (1813-1861), lost debate to Abraham Lincoln
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Ted,
ReplyDeleteIn 1954, Hank Aaron was playing for the Milwaukee Braves, the same Braves franchise that would eventually end up in Atlanta.
He finished his career with the Milwaukee Brewers as a designated hitter.
Absolutely right. Fixed now. My excuse: last week of classes. Senility. I'm a Boston fan?
ReplyDeleteKeep that backstopping comin'!
Ted
I don't understand why the writer is so cynical about places carrying "echoes of the past" -- the idea that stories evoking these historical echoes are "crappy" indicates to me that he doesn't value place very highly. Or perhaps he thinks it needs to be rescued. The latter is my belief, and that's why I'm doing a study on how daily newspapers "produce" a sense of place about the local. I think it's a very important part of what they do, and one that's endangered, at least in some newspapers.
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